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Thousands of government jobs have been lost since President Donald Trump took the Oath of Office a little over a month ago thanks to the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Nearly every day, there is news about Elon Musk and DOGE — and which federal agency will be next to have layoffs and firings.
As of Feb. 12, around 75,000 federal employees have accepted a “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives, like months of paid leave, to almost all federal employees who opted to leave their jobs by Feb. 6., according to the Office of Personnel Management.
Obviously, since 20% of the nearly 2.5 million government workers live in the Washington area, it’s affected a lot of people in the DMV.
An economist from the employment website Indeed spoke to WTOP about their data as of Feb. 14, 2025, said about the job market for these “knowledge workers” and their “white collar” jobs.
“We’re seeing federal workers starting to look for work outside of the departments they’re in,” Cory Stahle said. “We’ve definitely seen kind of a surge in that in the last month.”
Stahle went on to say that even though the labor market in general is pretty solid right now in the United States, there is really a divergence between the types of jobs that are available and the types of jobs that many of these federal workers are doing are much less abundant than they were before the pandemic.
“That’s going to, I think, really create some challenges in the labor market and really stress test the labor market in the coming months,” Stahle said.
According to Pew Research, 92% of government employees are white collar workers.
Answers to some common questions about the federal workforce.
Indeed shared the data with WTOP.
Knowledge worker job openings have been down, but things have begun to bounce back.
However, 92% of federal workers are knowledge workers — and the labor market is not currently hiring enough to absorb the workers who are being laid off.
- According to data, as of Feb. 14, 2025, overall job postings in the U.S. are up +10.4% compared to Feb 1, 2020 (our pre-pandemic baseline). However, in the DMV, that number is -11.8%.
- Currently, on Indeed, about 6.4% of job postings in the DMV are for software developers, compared to ~2% in the U.S. overall, meaning these job postings are three times greater in the DMV than in the U.S. as a whole.
- At the same time, software development job postings in the U.S. are down 34.2%. In the DMV, they are down 36.2%
- Given the scale of the announced layoffs and fewer opportunities for knowledge workers, the private sector may not be hiring enough to absorb these workers. And not only that, but companies that rely on federal contracts are likely to slow down hiring as contracts dry up as a result of the federal layoffs.
- Though the labor market is still pretty solid, a few industries like health care continue to drive job growth. Even if there are theoretically enough open jobs out there, a worker might not be able to, or want to, go from losing their job in the Department of Education to being a nurse.
The rate of employment of federal government workers compared to the population has been generally flat for the last few decades. These layoffs may throw the labor market into an unprecedented situation, with thousands of very specialized workers without a job or potentially many options.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Cory Stahle’s name.
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